It does seem like a major waste of resources to have two separate teams coding the same game. I noticed in one, up doesn't do anything on its own - you have to hold down the fire button and then push in the direction you want to jump in, the same fire button that swings your weapon. Very unnatural if you ask me.

Also when you use your weapon it often seems to poke the air either too high or too low to trouble your enemies.

Anyway, they're both pretty poor games, but I'm also curious to know the inside scoop behind the madness. Kind of reminds me of the shoddy coding that went into Dragon Ninja where the programmer forgot to implement the ability to jump. Bit of an oversight that!

Believe it or not you can jump in dragon ninja. You need to be at the absolute pixel edge of a platform and then jump. The landing has a two or three pixel margin for error. Nonsense and very frustarting but it just about works.
Back in the day the developers called to the amiga power offices in a huff due to them claiming jumping was not possible, in their review. The guy played the game in front of them to illustrate his point.